Sight impaired bicyclists complete 15,000-mile journey

Aug. 19, 2013

Updated Aug. 21, 2013 12:28 p.m.

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Christi Bruchok, left and Tauru Chaw, right, before leaving to cycle back to Phoenix in Costa Mesa Friday August 16. Bruchok and Chaw rode 15,000 miles from Argentina to Alaska. Both are blind to varying degrees. STUART PALLEY, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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Christi Bruchok, left, and Tauru Chaw, right, test out their news bikes before leaving to cycle back to Phoenix in Costa Mesa Friday August 16. Bruchok and Chaw rode 15,000 miles from Argentina to Alaska. Both are blind to varying degrees. STUART PALLEY, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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Tauru Chaw, left, and Christi Bruchok, right test out their news bikes before leaving to cycle back to Phoenix in Costa Mesa Friday August 16. Bruchok and Chaw rode 15,000 miles from Argentina to Alaska. Both are blind to varying degrees. STUART PALLEY, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

1 of 4

Christi Bruchok, left and Tauru Chaw, right, before leaving to cycle back to Phoenix in Costa Mesa Friday August 16. Bruchok and Chaw rode 15,000 miles from Argentina to Alaska. Both are blind to varying degrees. STUART PALLEY, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

Christi Bruchok, left and Tauru Chaw, right, before leaving to cycle back to Phoenix in Costa Mesa Friday August 16. Bruchok and Chaw rode 15,000 miles from Argentina to Alaska. Both are blind to varying degrees. STUART PALLEY, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

By the numbers

40 – 50: Average number of miles the two rode a day

7: The number of crashes and falls on the road

8: The number of bicycle tires replaced

The trip

For more information about blindness or the adventures of Tauru Chaw and Christi Bruchok please visit:

The Research to Prevent Blindness

www.rpbusa.org/rpb/

Two Blind to Ride

www.twoblindtoride.org

To Christi Bruchok, the world is one big impressionist painting.

The images she sees are like thick brush strokes on a landscape painting - subtle, abstract and blurry.

Bruchok, 32, is blind in one eye, and has 20/200 vision in the other, meaning if she wants to read a book she has to hold it up to her chin so her one good eye can read the text.

Her partner, Tauru Chaw, sees everything completely differently.

Chaw, 43, has severe tunnel vision. When he looks at Christi, he only sees her face but nothing else around her.

“It’s like seeing the world through a toilet paper roll,” he said over lunch last week at The Camp in Costa Mesa.

Both are legally blind.

Last month Chaw and Bruchok completed a feat many thought impossible with their conditions. They rode 15,000 miles on a tandem bike from the southernmost point of Argentina to the northern point of Alaska.

They did it because they knew they could.

But mostly, they did it to raise awareness about the abilities of the sight impaired and to inspire people living with “challenges.”

“Before we left there were people who told us we were too blind to ride,” said Chaw, a 1988 graduate of Loara High School in Anaheim. “I think I misheard them, though - I think they were telling us we were two blind to ride. That’s what we are. Two blind people riding around the world.”

Last week, the couple flew down from Alaska to Orange County after a year and a half on the bicycle trail. On Friday, the two headed back to their home in Phoenix from Fairview Park in Costa Mesa, again by bike.

Chaw and Bruchok have a partnership with Research to Prevent Blindness, in New York, to raise awareness about eye disease.

Bruchok has always had bad eyesight. She was born with severe myopia that progressively got worse and culminated when she lost total vision in her right eye during her sophomore year at Carnegie Mellon University.

“I was in total shock,” she said. “I woke up and it was complete darkness in my right side. It happened during midterms.”

She hid in her room and wouldn’t come out for days. She felt helpless and alone.

Sulking wasn’t getting her anywhere so she decided to confront her challenges rather than brood.

“It’s still a struggle,” Bruchok said. “It’s like, ‘everyone else can see but me. It’s not fair.’ But once I accepted that this is my reality, once I started owning it, then I began to feel better about myself.”

For Chaw, it’s only a matter of time before his vision disappears.

Chaw was born with retinitis pigmentosa, though he didn’t know about it until he went to an optometrist at the age of 30. Retinitis pigmentosa is a progressive degeneration of the retina. Chaw can’t see at night and has no peripheral vision.

The two were working at Intel Corp. in Arizona when Chaw was diagnosed. With doctors telling him his eyes would worsen until he was blind, he feared he wouldn’t experience seeing the world like he wanted.

In 2004, Bruchok was giving a company speech about working with a disability when Chaw approached her afterwards.

“He told me, ‘do you want to see the world with me?’” Bruchok remembers.

A few years later, the two quit their jobs and have been traveling the world since.

They backpacked across Asia for 14 months.

They rode a tandem bike in 2009 across the United States – from Huntington Beach to the Outer Banks in North Carolina; a journey they completed in three months.

Then, Chaw and Bruchok decided to ride through the Americas, all in an effort to prove that sight-impaired people can do great things.

They began their journey on January 2012 in Ushuaia, Argentina.

On a tandem bike with a 12-foot camper lugging behind, the two rode up South America visiting schools for the blind and other organizations.

Chaw was in front, navigating the terrain while Bruchok captained.

Both were dependent on each other.

She’d yell out if a traffic light was red or green while Chaw focused on the road in front of them.

They slept at gas stations, open fields, seedy motels and even at the homes of strangers they met along the way. They lived off $700 a month.

Because of their disabilities, they experience “sight seeing” differently than a normal person. They don’t remember the mountains, the Pacific Ocean or the scenery of the countries they passed through.

Chaw remembers the physical demand of pedaling an average 50 miles a day and how his body felt stressed absorbing the road conditions. Bruchok remembers the warmth of the hugs sight-impaired children gave her.

“We began to feel like ambassadors for the severely sight-impaired especially in a country that doesn’t give a lot of resources to blind organizations or schools,” said Bruchok.

It took four months to ride from Ushuaia, Argentina to Santiago, Chile. Another four months from Santiago to La Paz, Bolivia. The most adventurous part of their trip was when they crossed through to Central America, Chaw said.

There are no direct roads linking Columbia to Panama so they took a boat.

“We were hopping in cargo boats and fishing boats,” Chaw said. “There were probably things going on that we probably didn’t have to know about but as long as they could get us through, we were totally cool.”

From Central America they rode up to Arizona. It took another eight months to ride up from Phoenix to British Columbia, Canada before completing their journey on July 26, 2013 in Deadhorse, Alaska.

In total, the trip took a year-and-a-half.

Chaw said he and Bruchok are not done. They plan to continue their adventures and inspire sight impaired people along the way and the discrimination people have on them.

“We want people to see a person with disabilities in a different light,” Bruchok said.

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